Motion Picture Herald (Nov-Dec 1946)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD MARTIN QVIGLEY, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher TERRY RAMSAY E, Editor Vol. 165, No. OP December 14, 1946 STAGE and SCREEN WITH mingled emotions, none tragic, one may regard a piece about the stage which Mr. Max Gordon, Broadway producer, has done for the New York Times at the instance of Mr. Brooks Atkinson. Says Mr. Gordon: "The reason for the steady decline in the theatre is the . Inexorable fact that the movies and the radio have robbed the theatre of all its talents, either for full time or part time, and the legitimate theatre can never really be successful on a part time basis." So now he says it was a robbery! Also he says it's bad housing: "The business end of the theatre has not changed in thirty-five years . . . cramped theatres, cramped seats and bad stages. ..." Did the movies and the radio do that? Also he says it's the critics: "As things now stand, bad notices in The Times, The Tribune and The News are tantamount to a sign that reads 'Bad Fish For Sale'. . . . I wish we could devise some way for the public to decide for itself. . . . These critics are too powerful. ..." Mr. Gordon might observe that no three critics can kill a motion picture. That is in part because the motion pictures sell to the public — and do not depend so obviously, as the stage does, upon quoting critics. The stage has specially empowered the critics by depending on them. The unofficial but actual motion picture position is that: "A good review is very nice; an adverse review is nothing to show the boss, but unimportant, and no review at all is O.K. The customers' decide." The stage always has worried far too much about the people who come in on passes. ■ ■ ■ That sensation which swept the business scene, with a four million share surge in Wall Street, on the news of the truce in the John L. Lewis coal strike, is really like that transitory relief that comes with a lull in a headache. Now coming up December 16 is a scheduled meeting of ClO's Big Three: the steel workers, the auto workers and the electrical, radio and machine workers. Now that there is power to serve industry that is to be a campaign for wage increases for about two million workers. And there are other organizations which assuredly will be inspired. The motion picture must be concerned about the purchasing power of the whole people. HIM CONSIDERING TECHNIQUE SOME recent observations of the art, and of the publicity materials pertaining to same, remind one again that the customers are commonly and continually told more than is good for them about "how movies are made". It is really none of their business. All the customers are entitled to know is what the pictures look like — not how they got that way. Any time the customer can see and be conscious of any part of the synthesis of the production, with its process shots, its miniature sets, and the like, he is having the quality of dramatic illusion invaded. Emotional reaction to the drama is inescapably corroded when the patron has part of his mind on the machinery. An elaborate compendium of information for the press on a major production, at hand now, tells about fence rails shipped to a phony farm on a Hollywood sound stage, about some thousands of plants of hothouse corn transplanted, and how many rattlesnakes were used up getting an actor properly bitten. One good one was enough. The snake business is handled with discreet competency in the picture, but the publicity intimations might lead some sensitive customers to fear a screen spasm of lost weekend manifestations. While nature and nature-faking are under consideration, it is germane to suggest the establishment in the Hollywood region of a property herd of longhorn cattle. There are still some to be had in Mexico. Any sense of authenticity pertaining to the life of the great open places is inevitably outraged by the frequent presentation of sequences reporting on the excitements of the Chisholm ' Trail or the Abelene Trail, or any other trail of the days of the drovers, all lit+ered up with blocky, kind-eyed, white-faced Herford beef steers, yearning to get home to a feed of warm mash and the friendly attention of a 4H club farm boy. In today's "westerns" the women get wilder and the critters get milder. ■ ■ ■ FOR LOOKING MANY a year ago, as time is counted in the motion picture's speeding evolution, there was a flow of sheer beauty to the screen, known to the trade as "scenics". The fancy for them waned as the pictorial quality of the feature dramas improved and stories came to be told against the scenic backgrounds as production tended to move to "location". Reminiscence of the period came the other night at a screening of "The Yearling", MGM's poignant story of life and the struggle for life in the backlands of Florida. There Nature gave so abundantly of splendors, so lavishly of vistas, so tragically little of anything else. You have had report of the drama in the review enthusiasms of Mr. William R. Weaver, our Hollywood editor, and Mr. Sherwin Kane in Motion Picture Daily. The consideration here at the moment is sheer picture. There is much of that, and in interludes the production lingers with artful affection among the moss festooned liveoaks, the green hills against the Maxfield Parrish sky, following the grace of deer in bounding flight across a glade, surrendering time to a sunset's extravagance as a day flames to an end, all recorded with the indulgence of Technicolor in its most indulgent mood. ■ ■ ■ tf% Here is report on bureaucracy at work, over in socialist ^1 Britain. A United Press dispatch from London reports: "... The Earl of Clarendon, Britain's stage censor, deleted a reference to Mr. Strachey (John Strachey, Food Minister) from a song in a review, but approved a dig about Dr. Joad's recent defeat in a Parliamentary by-election." Dr. C. E. M. Joad is a noted philosopher, but is nonetheless a bit indignant. It couldn't happen here, so far. — Terry Ramsaye